Where the Wild Onion Grows

Wild onions grow everywhere here. I smell them through the moon roof on those particular weekend days when men are at home in their kingdom yards, busy mowing alone and in harmony.

If I made this up, forgive me, but I think maybe someone told me that a long time ago this entire area was once an onion farm.

No houses rubbing shoulders. No air-filled cauldrons with polyester cats spinning around them in the Halloween evenings.

This would have been in the brush of time before the acorns and maple helicopters conspired to take over and fill every crevice. This would have been when men broke rocks out of the earth and stacked them on eyeballed boundary lines between theirs and another’s.

This would have been when men were men by the time acne spread across their cheek and their work took them no further than the back 40.

Wild Again

The onions made themselves at home. No matter the weather or the plantings. No matter the earth gutted by building materials and cement foundations. The bulbs waited, still, in the warm earth and recovered the long winter.

Onions leaned against the crowding fescue. Onions disheartened by chem-green assaults but never dessicated.

The onion, once a domesticated spirit, reveals itself every year with pungent scent to greet the New England winds. Wild and untamed.

Elizabeth Howard

Elizabeth writes literary non-fiction, haiku, cultural rants, and Demand Poetry in order to forward the cause of beautiful writing. She teaches and speaks about the rhetorical impact of beautiful writing. A recent transplant to Connecticut, she calls London, Kansas City, and Iowa home. View all posts by Elizabeth Howard →

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